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Tuesday, January 17. 2012

It's good to see health technology playing a bigger and bigger role at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. However, you can tell this is an emerging market because most of the attention is focused on business opportunities rather than consumer solutions.

Dan Munro reports on CES at Forbes. Though he mentions personal health care products and services on display by Zeo, Fitbit, Qualcomm (sponsor of the "Tricorder X Prize" contest), the Continua Health Alliance, and Carnegie Mellon University, he's most excited about Life Technologies' Ion Proton Genetic Sequencer that, it is claimed, can sequence an entire human genome for around $1,000.

UnitedHealth Group, a major health insurance company, not only participated in CES, they created a special website for their CES presence. But is this because they are excited about the emerging opportunities or worried that private insurance will be driven out of the market by proponents of "single payer" (i.e., zero choice, zero competition) health care?

CES also featured the Digital Health Summit, a conference for "developers, manufacturers, distributors and service providers." Sessions included "Data Liberation: Making Health Data Intelligible for the Consumer" and "Is Technology Changing the Doctor-Patient Relationship?" Again, the agenda suggests an industry that is in search of a market breakthrough.

Personal health technology isn't going to take off until we free consumers to act as self-directed buyers of health care products and services and free the health care industry to compete for those buyers. Unfortunately, we are moving rapidly in the exact opposite direction.

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